Farhad Manjoo

At the time, Theranos was a promising medical startup and Uber looked like a slightly rough-around-the-edges solution to urban traffic. Bill Gates was the world’s greatest philanthropist, and you’d have been laughed out of town for suggesting — as presidential candidates and billionaires themselves now routinely do — that people as rich as him should not even be allowed to exist. This month both The New Yorker and the Atlantic published lengthy investigations into Jeff Bezos’ designs on owning basically everything. In 2014, the Amazon founder was hardly so existentially menacing; he seemed happily married, most decidedly not jacked, and he wasn’t even close to being the richest man in the world. LOL, he was poorer than Mark Zuckerberg.

The stakes were smaller then, is what I’m saying. Over five seasons, “Silicon Valley” has been viciously precise in lambasting techies’ anti-social foibles, but as to the industry’s fundamental contribution to the world, the series has mostly aped the zeitgeist, handling tech with loving, kid gloves.

The gang of awkward bros who are trying to make it big with Pied Piper, the show’s heroic central startup, have always been mostly good dudes, at least compared to their real-life startup bro analogues. They weren’t abetting Nazis. They weren’t breaking democracies, or taking money from murderous petromonarchs. Compared to pop cultural portrayals of the nation’s other power centers — to Wall Street, Hollywood or D.C. — “Silicon Valley” long found in Silicon Valley some capacity for inspiration, wonder and awe.

But in much the same way that later seasons of “Veep” had to amp up an atmosphere of dystopian peril to match the real-life descent of U.S. politics, HBO’s tech satire has also had to adjust. Society is now drowning in tech, and as we’ve all curdled in the glare of our phones, “Silicon Valley” got more sour, too. This works well as a story arc for a show set in the tech industry: Though Pied Piper has always been an idealistic company (fake idealism is the whole joke about this place), each season brought new avenues to abandon its ideals — the time they signed up thousands of fake users, or when their software caused phone explosions that injured their customers’ genitals.

But now the show is going even darker. In its final season, “Silicon Valley,” which returns Sunday, seems to be catching up with the bleak mood in and about the technology industry.

Even filtered through a zany lens — El Pollo Loco’s logo has a prominent role — the show is asking big questions, maybe the biggest questions: Can good coexist with greed? Is it OK to act unethically in the service of ethical ends? Does money necessarily ruin everything — and how much does that matter, if we’re talking billions?

It’s a delicious, somberly hilarious turn. The new season begins with Richard Hendricks, Pied Piper’s gangly chief (played by Thomas Middleditch), testifying before Congress about his company’s noble efforts to undermine Facebook, Google and Amazon — corporate “kings” who “monitor every moment in our lives” and “exploit our data for profit.”

But taking the high road isn’t easy in Silicon Valley. Unbeknown to Richard, Pied Piper has indeed been spying on its users, and in his maneuverings to save the company, Richard must decide whether to take $1 billion from a Chilean investor with ties to the Pinochet regime. The second episode ends with a mordant scene illustrating the dilemma. As Richard weighs taking money from the threatening would-be savior, a parade of birds fatally crashes into the investor’s glass windows in a steady drumbeat, each one landing in a beautiful outdoor water display, where a gardener is waiting to fish out the carcasses with a pool net.

It’s an awfully telling metaphor. In tech, you build a gleaming edifice for the whole world to enjoy — and if it results in some unexpected deaths, hey, you can always hire someone to clean it up. “What are you going to do?” the investor says with a shrug.

You might worry that the show risks losing laughs by languishing in the gloom. Much of the early episodes are concerned with ethics, after all, a subject that has long taken a back seat in real-life Silicon Valley. At one point, there is an extended meditation that feels ripped from tortured tech-company boardroom discussions about how to behave under newfound scrutiny. Richard and his long-suffering sweater-clad biz-dev exec, Jared Dunn (Zach Woods), ask themselves: How much wrong can we do and still live with ourselves?

But the laughs come in their pretzel-twisting justifications.

“Even if this is wrong, I suppose you could argue that it’s wrong in the service of rightness,” Jared suggests.

Richard chimes in with rising approval: “It’s unethical in the defense of ethics. Unjust in the quest for justice.”

Jared: “It’s like stealing from your pimp to pay for your friend’s appendectomy.”

So, yes, “Silicon Valley” is still a comedy. And in mining tech primarily for humor rather than dread, I suspect it will be the last show of its kind at least for some time. Newer takes on the industry — in “Black Mirror” most notably, but also upcoming adaptations of the scandals at Theranos and at Uber — depict the perils of technology and the business of tech more squarely, seriously and scarily.

It’s true that “Silicon Valley” has often ridiculed techies’ insistence that their primary goal is improving the world. The series’ best-ever quip, from Season 2, is the Hooli chief Gavin Belson’s insistence that “I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do.”

Yet even now, the show still holds out hope for tech’s redemption, and still seems to buy into its characters’ idea that they are mainly in this for the betterment of humanity. Mike Judge, the series’ co-creator, has often argued that there is a stark difference between Wall Street and tech: Wall Street only cares about money, but in tech, people do want something bigger, realer, better.

In the years since “Silicon Valley” hit the small screen, I’ve grown less and less sure that Judge is right. And despite the show’s darker turn, I worry that a neatly redemptive end — in which Pied Piper finally makes it big, crushing the competition without losing its soul — might be in the offing. The show’s best feature is its well-researched verisimilitude. Just about every gag and personality trait in the script seems copied from real life; many tech insiders, including Dick Costolo, the former chief executive of Twitter, consulted heavily with writers to ensure its realness.

But a redemptive end would mar that truth. What we’ve seen in real-life Silicon Valley in recent years is that it might be impossible to be successful and good. Success in tech almost necessarily involves exploitation — of users, of investors, of employees — and when it comes, it arrives at such disruptive scale that it invariably hurts someone, somewhere, in ways that nobody could see coming.

I’m curious how “Silicon Valley” will navigate these treacherous threads. If it were up to me, I’d rather Richard and the gang fail honorably, letting Pied Piper die, than succeed by selling out. But that, too, would be unreal.

This article originally appeared in

'Silicon Valley,' Darker Than Ever, Captures the Bleak Mood of Tech

When “Silicon Valley” premiered on HBO in 2014, Silicon Valley hadn’t yet ruined the world. Those were the salad days for the titans of tech: Digital billionaires were superheroes feted on magazine covers and in the White House, not supervillains hauled before Congress for fixing elections, sowing genocide, undermining truth and monopolizing all the globe’s commerce.

<h1>“There can be no separate college admissions system for the wealthy,” said Andrew Lelling, the U.S. attorney for the district of Massachusetts, announcing charges in a sprawling scheme in which dozens of rich parents are accused of bribing their kids’ way into prestigious American colleges. “And I’ll add there will not be a separate criminal justice system either.”</h1>

I have no quarrel with the charges. But as to Lelling’s bromide about our nation’s supposed vigilance against inequality: lol.

There has always been a separate college admissions system for the wealthy, just as there has always been a separate criminal justice system for them. (See: Manafort, Paul.)

The real news in the college-bribery scheme isn’t that the ultrarich have discovered a fast track to the Ivy League. Instead, the true story here concerns the petite charms of the slightly less bougie. Rather than the perfidies of billionaires and hundred-millionaires, the charges illustrate the anxieties afflicting people who are just below society’s tippy-top rung.

Dig into the parents charged and you find they are the mere mini-titans of tech, finance, law and entertainment, mostly falling into a class that billionaire Peter Thiel once described with pained sympathy as “single-digit millionaires.”

And while the billionaires are crushing society on a grand scale, the single-digit millionaires are striving to crush it small. Beyond what the bribery scheme says about the integrity of the American education system, the charges tell a story about the democratization of graft — or what you might more aptly call the Uberization of it.

One of the principal functions of the economy of the past few years has been to allow people on the lowest rungs of the 1 percent to live like their betters in the 0.1 percent — to provide drivers, cooks, personal assistants, cleaners, butlers, private jets and food delivery at the push of a button to anyone blessed with more wealth than time.

Now such push-button convenience has come to the business of special favors. Billionaires buy up senators and presidents and museum wings and endowed chairs. Single-digit millionaires, aiming to emulate their wealthier peers, engage in smaller but no-less-corrosive forms of graft, perhaps because they have become socialized to easing every hurdle through an app.

Because when you’re rich and you’re surrounded by a sea of not-rich, every problem shares the same solution: Who should I Venmo to fix this thing?

This truth plays out vividly in the college-bribery criminal complaint. In one passage, William Singer, founder of a college-prep business who authorities say was the architect of the scheme, explains his plan to a prospective parent.

“Every year there is a group of families, especially where I am right now in the Bay Area, Palo Alto” who “want guarantees — they want this thing done.” He goes on to describe three different ways of getting into college, all the while playing on his mark’s class anxiety.

He explains that there is the “front door” for chumps dumb enough to try to “get in on your own.” Then there is the well-known “back door” to college, which is the corruption we’re all familiar with: giving tons of dough to a university in the hopes of getting your kid’s name to stand out in the admissions office. Sometimes this works. Twenty years ago, New Jersey real estate mogul Charles Kushner gave $2.5 million to Harvard; a few months later, his son Jared got a place in the freshman class.

But Singer dismisses the back door. It costs “10 times as much money,” — he’s right about that — and because it’s greased by connections and a certain kind of social class, “there’s no guarantees.” Instead, Singer explains that he has devised something cheaper and more certain. Something more like an app. By contracting the little people — not drivers looking to make a little extra scratch but college athletics coaches, test proctors and a university administrator — he had pried open a “side door” into college.

“My families want a guarantee,” he says. “So, if you said to me, ‘Here’s our grades, here’s our scores, here’s our ability, and we want to go to X school’ and you give me one or two schools, and then I’ll go after those schools and try to get a guarantee done.”

Is there any better metaphor for the injustice of the modern economy than Singer’s “side door”? One popular defense of rising inequality is that it hurts no one: Sure, rich people keep getting richer, but if everyone else is also getting richer, albeit more slowly, why should the masses care, other than jealousy?

Corruption, routine and pervasive, is why we should care.

As Bob Dylan put it: Money doesn’t talk, it swears. Excess wealth doesn’t just buy shiny things. It buys power and influence, it buys class, and it buys permanence. It buys the corrupt certainty that every one of life’s problems might be evaded through some special side door, and it does so at the expense of not just the poor but all of us, shattering even the thin illusion of meritocracy that still somehow seduces American politics.

As Singer put it to his customers: “It’s the home run of home runs.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="3267b1b5-d991-4b2e-9a68-dbc90ae8a48e" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/opinion/college-admissions-bribery.html">The New York Times</a>.

The college bribery scandal and the uberization of graft

There has always been a separate college admissions system for the wealthy, just as there has always been a separate criminal justice system for them. (See: Manafort, Paul.)

<h1>The internet truly is super-duper fake, and thanks to the malleability of digital media and the jet fuel of network virality, a digital lie can spread more quickly, and cause more damage, than an analog one.</h1>

We all know that. Still, the blame-the-internet formulation has grown useless lately, because “the internet” has become inseparable from everything else. Social networks are now so deeply embedded into global culture that it feels irresponsible to think of them as some exogenous force. Instead, when it comes to misinformation, the internet is a mere cog in the larger machinery of deceit. There are other important gears in that machine: politicians and celebrities; parts of the news media (especially television, where most people still get their news); and motivated actors of all sorts, from governments to scammers to multinational brands.

As these players adapt to a digital politics, they infect and become infected by novel possibilities for misinformation. It is in the confluence of all these forces that you come upon the true nightmare: a society in which small and big lies pervade every discussion, across every medium; where deceit is assumed, trust is naïve, and a consensus view of reality begins to feel frighteningly anachronistic.

You don’t need to travel far to find such a nightmare. But distance can help clarify the picture: It’s easier to appreciate the simmering pot when you’re looking at it from the outside, rather than boiling in it.

And so I spent much of the last week watching a pot boil over on the other side of the world.

In retaliation for a terrorist attack against Indian troops last month, India conducted airstrikes against Pakistan. After I learned about them, I tried to follow the currents of misinformation in the unfolding conflict between two nuclear-armed nations on the brink of hot war.

What I found was alarming; it should terrify the world, not just Indians and Pakistanis. Whether you got your news from outlets based in India or Pakistan during the conflict, you would have struggled to find your way through a miasma of lies. The lies flitted across all media: there was lying on Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp; there was lying on TV; there were lies from politicians; there were lies from citizens.

Besides outright lies, just about everyone, including many journalists, played fast and loose with facts. Many discussions were tinged with rumor and supposition. Pictures were doctored, doctored pictures were shared and aired, and real pictures were dismissed as doctored. Many of the lies were directed and weren’t innocent slip-ups in the fog of war but efforts to discredit the enemy, to boost nationalistic pride, to shame anyone who failed to toe a jingoistic line. The lies fit a pattern, clamoring for war, and on both sides they suggested a society that had slipped the bonds of rationality and fallen completely to the post-fact order.

The lies began immediately after Indian forces attacked what they described as a terrorist training camp in a Pakistani town called Balakot. The Indian government offered no visual proof of the effectiveness of its strikes, and there is still debate among Indian politicians about what was hit. Pakistan’s military quickly put out pictures from Balakot showing not much damage.

Indian media, however, appeared eager to fill in a government-friendly narrative. As the Indian fact-checking site Alt News documented, several outlets, including some of the country’s largest TV news networks, aired what they described as exclusive footage of Indian fighter jets attacking Balakot.

Except it wasn’t. The fighter-jet footage was actually first posted online in 2017, Alt News found. It appeared to have been resurrected on social networks last week and then lifted by Indian TV networks as proof of the attack.

Not that Pakistani media were above fakery. After Pakistan’s air force shot down an Indian jet and captured a pilot who was later released, Pakistani media began airing images of downed aircraft. Except, as fact checkers documented, the pictures were old, showing wreckage from a previous crash.

You would think fact-checking this stuff would limit its spread. Instead, what happened was that each side weaponized fact-checking, taunting the other for wallowing in lies without acknowledging its own part in all the fakery.

What I’ve shared here is just a taste. If you dive into the tireless fact-checking sites policing the region, you’ll find scores more lies from last week, some that flow across both sides of the conflict and many so intricate they defy easy explanation.

And you will be filled with a sense of despair.

The Indian government recently introduced a set of draconian digital restrictions meant, it says, to reduce misinformation. But when mendacity crosses all media and all social institutions, when it becomes embedded in the culture, focusing on digital platforms misses the point.

In India, Pakistan and everywhere else, addressing digital mendacity will require a complete social overhaul. “The battle is going to be long and difficult,” Govindraj Ethiraj, a journalist who runs the Indian fact-checking site Boom, told me.The information war is a forever war. We’re just getting started.

This article originally appeared in <a id="b7d33e6f-0ba6-4ac0-9088-fcfb0f0d474c" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/opinion/india-pakistan-news.html">The New York Times</a>.

The India-Pakistan conflict was a parade of lies

We all know that. Still, the blame-the-internet formulation has grown useless lately, because “the internet” has become inseparable from everything else.

<h1>Working in digital media is like trying to build a fort out of marshmallows on a foundation made of marbles in a country ruled by capricious and tyrannical warring robots. </h1>

I’ve toiled in this business for nearly 20 years, and even in the best of times, it has been a squeamish and skittering ride, the sort of career you’d counsel your kids to avoid in favor of something less volatile and more enduring — bitcoin mining, perhaps.

It might be tempting, then, to dismiss the recent spate of media-biz layoffs as unfortunate but otherwise not concerning. Two hundred workers, including dozens of journalists, were given the slip last week at BuzzFeed. About 800 people are losing their jobs in the media division of Verizon, the telephone company that owns Yahoo, HuffPost, TechCrunch and many other “content brands.” And Gannett, the once-mighty newspaper empire that owns USA Today and hundreds of smaller outlets — from The Bergen County Record to The Zanesville Times Recorder — is letting go of 400.

But it would be a mistake to regard these cuts as the ordinary chop of a long-roiling digital media sea. Instead, they are a devastation.

The cause of each company’s troubles may be distinct, but collectively the bloodbath points to the same underlying market pathology: the inability of the digital advertising business to make much meaningful room for anyone but monopolistic tech giants.

Coming in a time of economic prosperity, at world-historical levels of interest in the news, last week’s cuts tell a story of impending slow-motion doom — and a democratic emergency in the making, with no end in sight.

Consider: We are in the midst of a persistent global information war. We live our lives on technologies that sow distrust and fakery, that admit little room for nuance and complication, that slice us up into ignorant and bleating tribes. It is an era that should be ripe for journalists and for the business of journalism — a profession that, though it errs often, is the best way we know of inoculating ourselves against the suffocating deluge of rumor and mendacity.

And for a while, it looked like we could do that. The past half decade has been a season of bold and optimistic innovation in media. In addition to the Trump bump, there was new money from venture capitalists, and giants in cable and telecom. Big brands, looking to attract millennials, began to spend haltingly and then generously on advertising, leading to a Cambrian explosion of new sites, new formats, new business models. And consumers began opening up their wallets to support journalism, turning around the fortunes of The New York Times.

Many in the industry remain optimistic about these ways forward. There’s a doubling-down on subscriptions, a rush to podcasts and high-end video, and a return to smaller and more calculated media ventures, like Bill Simmons’ tiny but profitable startup, The Ringer. Then there is the charity of digital billionaires. The Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post, Laurene Powell-Jobs’ Atlantic magazine, Marc Benioff’s Time and Farhad Manjoo’s Color Me Skeptical That the Billionaires Who Got Us Into This Mess Will Save Us Gazette.

But it takes only a quick jaunt through the particulars of last week’s layoffs to snuff out much reason for optimism.

In the cuts at Gannett, we see the nearly final evisceration of local news, an institution recognized as democratically vital even by the mainstream media’s most frothing detractors. Gannett’s end now looks nigh; the company is presently laboring under a hostile takeover bid by a secretive hedge fund whose only demonstrated expertise lies in “strip-mining” publications of their final morsels of profit.

In the troubles at Verizon, we see a behemoth that tried to take on Google and Facebook. Under a former executive, Tim Armstrong, the phone company bought up Yahoo and other media brands as useful pawns in a strategic war against internet giants. For similar reasons, Comcast has also plowed money into media startups.

But Verizon quickly learned that Facebook and Google are insurmountable. When new management took over last year, it began dumping the news in favor of readier ways to make money.

It’s the cuts at BuzzFeed that sting most. You may regard the site as a purveyor of silly listicles and inane quizzes. I think of it as a relentlessly experimental innovator: It’s the site that gave us The Dress and published The Dossier, a company that pushed the rest of the industry to regard the digital world with seriousness and rigor.

More than anyone else in media, BuzzFeed’s founder, Jonah Peretti, bet on symbioses with the tech platforms. He understood that the tech giants would keep getting bigger, but to him, that was a feature, not a bug. By creating content that hooked into their algorithms, he imagined BuzzFeed getting bigger — and making money — along with them.

At the least, the layoffs suggest the tragic folly of Peretti’s thinking. Google and Facebook have no economic incentive for symbiosis; everything BuzzFeed can do for them can also be done by the online hordes who’ll make content without pay.

So where does that leave media? Bereft.

It is the rare publication that can survive on subscriptions, and the rarer one that will be saved by billionaires. Digital media needs a way to profitably serve the masses. If even BuzzFeed couldn’t hack that, we are well and truly hosed.

This article originally appeared in <a id="eae8555a-ed8b-4b67-ba6c-1085d10a1a5f" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/opinion/buzzfeed-layoffs.html">The New York Times</a>.

The BuzzFeed layoffs as democratic emergency

It might be tempting, then, to dismiss the recent spate of media-biz layoffs as unfortunate but otherwise not concerning.

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